One image says it all

Gialli's plots explanation or resolution often hides within one key image.

In "The bird with the crystal plumage", it's a painting - bought in an antique shop - which reflects the initial trauma experienced by the murderer.
"The bloodstained shadow" also revolves around a painting which depicts the terrible truth behind a scene the main character was a witness of when he was a child, and that he could not remember in details.

It's a photograph that reveals, when blown up several times, a murder was committed in Antonioni's "Blow-up". A similar treatment applied to a newspaper photograph (by the way, how unrealistic given the usual quality of pictures in papers!) unveils the secret behind the scorpion cuff links in "The case of the scorpion's tail".
We could also mention it's the re-cropping of a photograph which shows that what initially looked like an accident - a man falling under a train in a railway station - was indeed a murder in Argento's "The cat o'nine tails"...

Paintings or photographs, Giallo marks the victory of the visual and symbolic approach over the narrative, litterary explanations which used to prevail in "classic" thrillers up until the late 60s.
In this instance, it illustrates this genre's modernity, reflecting the movement towards the image-based society we all know now.

Doll rage

It's fairly anecdotical. But ever since I saw The Bloodstained Shadow (Antonio Bido, 1978), the doll scene has stayed in a corner of my memory, as a sick visual idea to express blind and gratuitous violence.

We have here an apparently very "bourgeois" woman, who's hiding her monstruously difformed son at home, as we later find out. Their relationship is obviously perverse: under the pretext of maternal love he is her prisoner and stays locked in the house all day. Despite he's already an adult, she takes care of him as if he was a baby. He's even got a doll.

A lovely baby doll.
Which is tortured and dismembered before our very eyes when the woman, for obscure reasons, decides to punish her for having been naughty to her son, her 'baby'...
After this visually striking burst of rage, the doll is left mutilated on the floor. And we're left with that very uncomfortable feeling a child has just been tortured to death in front of us.

Like the rest of the film though, this scene is somewhat formulaic. As if it was trying to be a recipe for a giallo: dismembering a doll, that is gross.
Yet so efficient.


More from this blog on "The Bloodstained Shadow" here.

A serious problem of faith

The 1970s will remain a dark decade for Italy. Shaken by scandals, corruption and terrorism, the country went through a deep and long-lasting crisis. The Italian society's fundamental pillars themselves were questioned and sometimes rejected.

Beyond the aesthetisation, beyond the twisted plots and the originality of the genre, the major earthquake of the Italian society's crisis is clearly showing through in Giallo.
On this particular subject, again there are strong links between two gialli I talked about previously: Who saw her die? (Aldo Lado - 1972) and The Bloodstained Shadow (Antonio Bido - 1978).

The first one was opening the decade by casting a dark light on Religion - an essential and untouchable element of Italian society -, through the terrifying example of a schizophrenic queer priest.
The second one was closing the 70s going even further in skepticism and nihilism, by frontally attacking both Religion and the ultimate Italian institution: La Famiglia (Family).
Both films share a similar disturbing ending symbolically picturing the inevitable fall of these institutions to their death.

By the time it reached the 80s, it looks like Italy had completely lost faith in itself.

More from this blog on these two films here, here and there, and a reflection about Italy's fall at the end of the 60s through the analysis of "Il Sorpasso" (The Easy Life, 1962 - Dino Risi).

Born too late

In giallo, there seems to be a pre- and post-Deep Red era. As if after Argento's masterpiece, any other giallo would be made in vain.

Solamente Nero (The Bloodstained Shadow - Antonio Bido, 1978) clearly belongs to the post-Deep Red period.

Not that it's a bad giallo. Actually its opening scene is visually striking and catches you within seconds. The plot as well is rather good, as twisted and dark as it can get (and the doll dismembering scene alone is sick enough to make this film worth seeing).

Music is also a highlight, building angst in a very modern way. Composed by Stelvio Cipriani, it was nevertheless performed by Goblin for obscure money questions with their label, Cinevox.
And even this simple fact that the score comes from Goblin immediately puts this film in a "post-giallo golden age" period.

Bido's mise-en-scène is quite daring and imaginative, yet the overall feeling is that even he does not completely believe in what he's doing. All the right ingredients are here, but the plate does not taste as good as it should. Maybe it was served too late.

And this might well be the key: Antonio Bido made this film too late. As if he wanted to move back in time, to compensate for missed opportunities. As if it was a "remake".
The director knows this: in the DVD's extras, he first stresses the fact that he had some influence on Dario Argento's work... and finally regrets he did not shoot more giallos.

"Solamente Nero", the nostalgic giallo.


As an illustration, the location of this film strongly contributes to this strange feeling: read more here from this blog.
And get the film there, from Anchor Bay.

Venice before and after the fall

Despite having been shot by different directors and at a different period of time, both "Who Saw Her Die?" (1972) and "The Bloodstained Shadow" (1978), from the excellent Giallo Collection DVD set, show interesting symmetric links.

Example: Venice as a crucial element of the scenario.

In "Who saw her die?", Venice is like a stylish maze where the killer, the children and Franco play hide-and-seek. The settings are beautiful and neat, but the feeling is that it's a dangerous place where you can get lost. This is especially true when Franco's desperately looking for his daughter throughout the labyrinthic city. The architecture and topography are building mystery, tension, but somehow leaving some space for hope.

At the contrary, in "The Bloodstained Shadow", Venice looks like a ghost town: run-down, dirty, isolated and unappealing. A sad Venice. The opposite of anyone's dream picture of the city. Here the overall impression is a city which is lifeless and hopeless (in fact, Antonio Bido did not shoot his film in Venice, but in a nearby island called Murano, which is like a suburb of Venice). There's no doubt to have about the possibility of evil striking: it is already too late.

In one case Venice is a beautiful trap, in the other it is an abandoned cimetary.

This is just one example of the numerous connections between both films, on which we'll get back to in future posts.

Get the Giallo Collection DVD set here, and check out this picture of Murano's church - doesn't it ring a bell?
More on "Who saw her die?" in this blog here.